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Recent years have seen the rise of a new genre in news coverage: comics journalism. It combines journalistic techniques with the use of comics as a medium. Instead of reporting verbally, journalists draw the news. However, if journalists use a medium for news coverage that is associated with fiction, how will readers know whether the comics journalists are telling the truth, whether their reports are not fictional? Results of our qualitative content analysis show: journalists employ several visual strategies in their comics to appear authentic and reliable. Authentication strategies are: the author’s presence, physical resemblance, stylistic devices, documentary evidence, and the meta-story of the comic. To better understand the tricky relationship between comics and journalism, we contextualise the emergence of comics journalism by looking back into the history of comics and graphic novels and discussing the journalistic principles of truthfulness and objectivity as well as the inherent subjectivity of comics journalism. The paper concludes with an outlook on future developments.